The invention concerns a support for sheaves of pipe that prevents each pipe individually, and each sheaf as a whole, from sagging, wherein each pipe extends through a more or less matching perforation in a support disk.
Pipe supports of this type are employed for example in more or less elongated pipe-sheaf chemical reactors for catalytic processes, the tubes containing the catalyst and being penetrated by the reaction gas whereas they are surrounded, within the reactor shell, by a heat transfer medium, mostly in the form of a water, oil or salt bath. The individual pipes must be separated from one another and from the reactor jacket. Whereas the fluid that supplies and removes heat is forced essentially across the sheaf by baffles or similar structures in shorter packed reactors, efforts are usually made to ensure that it will flow along the pipes as unobstructed as possible in the more elongated models. The supports must accordingly not only be strong enough to hold the pipes but also open enough to allow the fluid through, especially in the vicinity of each pipe. In a case where the length of the reactor tubes is of the order of e.g. 20 feet, they have to be additionally supported somewhere between the two endwise tube plates yet this support is to interfere as little as possible with the mainly axial flow of the heat transfer medium along the tubes.
Previous attempts to comply with these requirements have usually involved supports comprising intersecting bunches of straight rods extending between the separate rows of pipe and then fastened together with lateral projections, openings, etc. Another approach involves enclosing the separate pipes in sleeves connected by short welded-in rods. Both solutions, however, are very labor intensive and almost impossible to use with sheaves of large numbers of close-together pipes.